Archive for the ‘ Philosophy ’ Category

Why Be When You Will Only Be Killed?

As you can see, this is another one of my cheerful, optimistic messages. But I think the basic message bears repeating.

We are at the end of a long process, where we thought we were making ourselves better and better (since our technology was getting better and better) but this made us less and less satisfied with being human. And we eventually went so far as to revolt against being human – since being human was so inferior – and even disgusting.

This was the familiar problem of the dangerous other – but the other had become us.

In other words, this was a problem of identity – what we identified with. And by concentrating for so long on making our precious things better, we naturally came to see the process of eternal improvement as the right way – and could not help but notice that improving people seemed to be nearly impossible. What other conclusion could we draw?

The answer, of course – is that we could have noticed that we were the ones doing all this improving. But our attention had been directed outward – towards the things being perfected – not inward, towards ourselves.

The result was paradoxical. We identified with our things, and thought they make us better – but rejected the human part of this mix – the most important part by far.

What we have here is a problem of attention – and what we are attending to. As humans we have always had the tendency to become enraptured of our own creations – and neglecting ourselves by comparison. In the last several hundred years this tendency has become rampant – with disastrous consequences.

This was bad enough, but a side-effect of this was much worse – we became unable to notice that this was happening. We became obsessed with wonderfulness – and could not notice anything else. Such as what was really going on. We only noticed what we thought was going on – which was a illusion on a global scale.

What do people do when they are faced with a situation like this? They stop being - to their minds, the only solution. Although I should clarify that – they decide to become like everyone else. And not be themselves – the normal human situation. This results in a tyranny of the masses. Which can easily be observed in any office – by anyone with the eyes to see – which is almost no one.

The world is now owned by the masses – who are nobodies (literally no-bodies). Take it from me – because you will not see this anywhere else.

This was certainly true of my father’s generation – who thought they were giving us everything – when in fact they were giving us nothing – in the way of being human. To this day, this makes me furious. This was hypocrisy on a grand scale. They gave us nothing but a broken world – and then had the nerve to brag about it.

2013
05/16
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
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Things Are so Bad No One Wants to Know About Them

This is another posting where I go on and on about things no one else can see. I used to wonder if I was crazy, but have decided that maybe I am – but I am crazy in an organized way. So much so I may even be sane.

My subject this morning is the usual one – life in the decline of the American Empire – which has evolved into a global culture.

I am well-qualified to write about this, since I lived in that collapse – and had the unique ability to see (or more accurately, feel) what was going on.

The gap between our thinking and our feeling – between our cognitive and emotive facilities – has become as extreme as it can get. So much so that neither one can work properly.

To put this another way – we are afraid of being. And no fear could be more debilitating. Why are we afraid? Because no one else wants us to know what they don’t want to know themselves.

This is paradoxical. We are surrounded by every opulence, but live in emotional and mental poverty. And not only that, but are unaware of this. And don’t want to be aware, because we believe it would be too painful.

“So what’s the solution?” You may ask. It is much the same question the Stoics answered in their time. The answer is the same “Live your own life as best you can. And try to make things better, if you can – but also realize that this (in the long run) is impossible.”

To this I would also add that our problems could be understood (it seems to me) If we just stepped off our treadmill (where we are chasing progress) and noticed what was going on.

This is wisdom – but wisdom few (practically no one, actually) will accept.

2013
05/15
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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I am Better than You Are

This is one of the oldest messages in history. Every animal knows it, and every plant – where predatory species (such as the strangler fig) are common.

Humans know it too - very well. Equality was (and still is) a fine idea. But the way things are going, it remains an ideal.

One of the reasons for this is what I keep harping on – Technology (with a capital T). We have not kept it under control – and now it controls us.

This is especially true of our latest technology – the Computer. It keeps giving us this message: “I am better than you!”

You may object that you never heard this message – and that I am making things up. That you are a perfectly rational being than cannot be moved by unconscious messages – such as those in advertising.

If you feel this way, you are badly mistaken – and are especially susceptible to their influences.

The cell phone is the perfect example of this. Costa Rica, where I live – and all the rest of the underdeveloped world, have become completely addicted to them.  Every time they use one – which is frequently – they get this message “We are much better than you, and you have to serve us!” Which they do, by diverting some of their meager income toward their maintenance. Cell phone towers have sprung up like mushrooms.

They have not succumbed completely – they can still function normally in many ways, but a precious part of them – their attention has been diverted elsewhere.

Their political skills, an important part of their social skills, remain woefully underdeveloped. And the reason for this is easy to see – their society has neglected this for hundreds of years.

Is America any better off? Yes and no. America is much better organized – after all it invented the Computer. But its political skills have badly atrophied. And it has allowed the Financial Industry to divert much of its money to itself.

Americans have become helpless – and see no way of changing this. They are afraid of being persons in their own right – because persons have lost their rights.

They have been overwhelmed – not by a person or a group of persons – as in Fascism - but by a technology. I refer you to a recent posting of mine Us and Our Technologies - which explains what I mean by that.

2013
05/14
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
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A Society That is Both Conformist and Dictatorial

The prototype for this society, our society, was Fascism - which happened in many countries in the Thirties – especially Italy, Germany, and Japan. The German variety, Nazism, has been studied to death – without, as far as I know, any substantial understanding of it. We know almost nothing about the Japanese variety, and don’t even have a name for it. But since the Nazis are know so well known, we can take them as an example of what can happen to an advanced country faced with the stresses of post-modern life.

Americans will immediately object, pointing out that they won WWII, defeating the Germans and Japanese (and as a side-issue, the Italians). Therefore, they say, Americanism triumphed over the forces of evil and all is well with the world.

This overlooks a few things – such as the USSR, which was our ally during the war. But it also overlooks something vastly more important – the developments in America after the war. Which were unbelievable – and which I want to write about now.

These changes can be summarized easily: the Corporation (or, on the international scene, Globalization) has become all-powerful. This is organized as a combine of dictatorial societies (different interlocking companies) who were all hierarchies – with a few at the top in control, and the few getting most of the loot. China, interestingly enough, has the same type of organization – where the Party controls everything. Dictatorships, of one kind or another, now control the world.

Many of these are still dictatorships of the past. But the new dictatorships are well-worth giving some thought to.

Which plenty of people have – and they have universally condemned the organization (in its various forms) as evil – to use a good, old-fashioned, four-letter word.

I agree with them – but I think the situation is more complicated than just plain evil – or man’s inhumanity to man – which, as Jesus said – is with us always. I am a believer in complexity theory – which notes, that as situations become more complex emergent properties appear – something that was not there before – at all. To understand our new world – we have to understand these new properties.

Immediately, people will say “I don’t wanna know!” Without saying this out-loud in so many words. But anyone with the slightest social sensitivity (even me) will hear this message loud and clear – and obey.

But I am different – and I want to think about it – now. And to do that I will have to go back to when everything last changed. To the Enlightenment. Which taught that men should be free. Who could argue with that? But these thinkers (and they were thinkers) overlooked one thing – human nature.

And they overlooked one more thing – the rise of the masses – a product of the Industrial Revolution – which overwhelmed the Enlightenment completely.

I must take some time out now and discuss human nature. Other thinkers have pointed out – correctly – that human nature is dependent on its context. And have even gone so far as to say - erroneously - that individual human natures do not exist. When anyone observing any three-year old can see it plainly enough.

Human nature is the result of two things – our biology and our society. And I want to follow up on that.

Who we were back in the 18th Century depended on who were were at the time. But in the succeeding three hundred years (more or less) we have evolved – and are now something different. Our basic human nature – combined with our social conditioning – has produced something brand new.

I must now tie together the two strands of my discussion. At the macro level – our extremely unequal society. And at the micro level the masses who insist on – and enforce – this arrangement. Logically, this makes no sense – but this does not matter. It is the way it is. Sheldon S. Wolin has written about this in his Democracy, Inc. – Managed Democracy and the Spector of Inverted Totalitarianism.

But now I must talk of the masses. Something no one wants to talk about – because they have become us. Ortega y Gasset first noted these back in the Thirties – but he had no idea where they had come from. As I have said before – they appeared as the workers in the Industrial Economy. They performed the functions required by this economy – they functioned as little more than machines. And eventually they were replaced by machines – computers.

People were still left around – but they had become consumers – easily manipulated by the Media. They no longer exist as humans.

Perhaps I have left you confused. It has been a long discussion, and it really needs a book to cover it.

2013
05/12
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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The Vietnam War DID Happen

The Vietnam War was one of the worst disasters in our history. Americans – and even the American Military – thought they learned a lesson from it – one they would never forget. Thirty years later – in the Iraq War – they had forgotten that lesson entirely – that you cannot fight an insurgency. It is simply impossible.

Americans believe that nothing is impossible – at least for them. This was true of us going into the Vietnam War – as told so well in A Rumor of War - which I am listening to now. Philip Caputo did not try to write a polemic against war – he only wrote of his experiences in one. But how anyone could draw any other conclusion is beyond me.

Americans will say they are against war – and say it over and over – but go to war over the slightest provocation – even it they have to make one up.

2013
05/07
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
Political comment
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What the American Way of Life has Become

Americans seem determined to be a stupid as possible. And they have succeed admirably.

And the rest of the world seems to be following their example. The American Way of Life (actually a way of death) is infectious. Because it is  so simple, as I said in a recent posting Obama has Taken Advantage of America - where I accidently stumbled on a label for it – the Topsy-Turvy World. Where everything is the exact opposite of what it seems to be.

The emotional appeal of this is irresistible. We get the satisfaction of being good – when we are actually being bad (what we actually want to be). And not only that – we can make money doing this.

This is possible because our minds conceive of opposites as being the same thing – and can easily confuse the two. We have always been this way, but until now common sense has usually kept the two separate. We have now found a way of overriding this – to our great detriment. But to our topsy-turvy minds it seems to be to our great advantage.

Actually, as much as I hate to admit it, this is not a new idea. Freud touched on it in his Civilization and Its Discontents. But he didn’t dare offend his readers by accusing them of being stupid – and liking to be that way. Even though the Nazis were all around him – and doing just that. As a result, all his four sisters – women in their late seventies, died in Nazi concentration camps.

People have often been stupid – but now we cannot tell the difference.

2013
05/07
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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Remembering How Bad it Was

The world of my childhood was bad – but no one wants to remember that. Or realize that it produced people who have died cannot be brought back to life.

One exception is the book Fun Home. It is a family autobiography in pictures – an adult comic book. It is a best seller.

From Wikipedia:

Fun Home (subtitled A Family Tragicomic) is a 2006 graphic memoir by American writer Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It chronicles the author’s childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, USA, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one’s family. Writing and illustrating Fun Home took seven years, in part because of Bechdel’s laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure.

Being totally isolated, living in rural Costa Rica – I learned about this from a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) I am taking – which is about the Modern – Postmodern transition.

Our instructor (the President of Wesleyan University) has his own take on this – which does not particularly impress me – but he is a well-connected intellectual, in touch with what is going on.

One person who impresses him is Slavoj Žižek who has an article in the London Review of Books called You May! about the post-modern superego. I quote:

In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian master/slave relationship becomes transgressive. This paradox or reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis does not deal with the authoritarian father who prohibits enjoyment, but with the obscene father who enjoins it and thus renders you impotent or frigid. The unconscious is not secret resistance to the law, but the law itself.

This is dynamite stuff – and helps me understand my own bizarre personality. But for the average person it might as well be written in Sanskrit.

All this says one thing, in plain language – that we have been screwed over in some very sophisticated ways. Which only a few of us can barely comprehend.

2013
05/05
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
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Being and Doing

These are two different things, but we tend to confuse them. We should consider their differences carefully (there are advantages to both ways) – but we seem to be determined not to think about them at all.

The basics are simple – being is organic, a part of life. Doing is mechanical, a matter of developing a routine, and then following it. This routine is usually unconscious and socially dependent – but it is mechanical – and very difficult to stop.

Being allows us to be emotional and socially interactive. Doing allows us to get things done. This fine balance was permanently disrupted when we got more emotional satisfaction from doing than from being.

The practice of meditation is very useful in helping us tell the difference. Once we get the mind quieted down (no small task) we can feel what is going on in our bodies and our minds (really the same thing).

Why don’t more people meditate? Because they don’t want their being to interfere with their doing – which is what they want to do to the exclusion of everything else. They want to be human doings.

Almost everyone will agree, in theory, that we should be more human – more compassionate and considerate. But in practice they behave entirely differently. And are completely unable to notice this.

This is our problem – not that we don’t have fine ideals – but that we have become so unaware, we cannot tell if we are following them or not.

This is, it seems to me – is a deliberate policy. We are the exact opposite of what we think we are. And this, we think, is very clever of us.

When, in fact, it is very stupid of us – because we have destroyed ourselves.

2013
05/04
CATEGORY
Meditation
Morality
Negative being
Philosophy
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The Problem of Being Human

“This is a problem?” You may ask. “What else can we be?” My answer is straight-forward: “We have been, and we are, many other things. The last thing we want to be is human.”

If you are still with me, you might ask “Why not?” And this is the question I want to answer. Why do we not want to be human?

The answer must have varied many, many times. But when we became civilized (a huge, huge subject in itself) we did develop an aversion to what we had been before that – and saw that way of life as inferior. When it was not at all.

I once did a trek through the hill-tribes of northern Thailand. When I got back to my hotel, a  powerful thought hit me “When the original people are gone – we are doomed!” Those people know how to live - how to be human.  On that trek, we met an anthropologist, and I asked her how much longer they would last. “Maybe thirty-five years,” she said. And that was over forty years ago.

The situation in Thailand has deteriorated so badly since then I cannot bear to think about it. And the same could be said for every other country in the region. They have gone from bad to impossible. And American (and Chinese) intervention has only made the situation worse.

But I must get back to the subject. What happened in America in the last half of the last century? Most of the world is clearly finished, but what about us? You will not like my answer “We are finished too.” And for the simplest of reasons – because we have stopped being human.

This will take some explaining – and perhaps a whole book would not do it justice. But I will attempt an outline. The basic idea is simple – we have stopped being people and become something else.

These alternative realities (what we have become) have been a whole series of economies - the latest being the information economy. The very idea of an economy implies much more than we care to admit. One thing it implies is that people have become consumers - and have become helpless to change that.

To understand our situation, we would have to revert to being human again – something we can no longer be (and don’t want to be).

2013
05/03
CATEGORY
Economy
Philosophy
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Modernity According to Foucault

I am reading his What is Enlightenment? for the second time. The first time it did not register – and I concluded he did not know what he was talking about. This time, I think he is on to something.

From page 40 of The Foucault Reader:

Modernity of not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to “heroize” the present…

This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain it or perpetuate it. It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity.

The man of modernity goes hurrying, searching – this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert…is looking for whatever element of poetry it may contain within history…Just when the world is falling asleep, he begins to work…Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.

What to make of all this? Actually, I can make quite a lot from it – from my own personal experience.

In my last job, I made it my business to understand what the company’s product was. A product that they praised to the high skies. It was not only great – it was going to take over the whole world (and make us rich)! If you had been in Silicon Valley at the time you could have recognized the attitude – pure BS – but you dared not say so.

I set to work, interviewing the people who had implemented the product for their first customer. I simply asked them “What did you do?” In some detail, of course – first this, and then this. When you did something (I thought) – you have to have a method for doing it.

A number of tools had been developed for doing this: Business Process Modeling (BPM). I found I was a natural at doing this – which involves looking behind the usual smoke-and-mirrors to see what was really going on.

Eventually I realized that our product was a common one: vaporware – nothing but hype. I knew I was in trouble – big trouble – and tried to hide my discovery. But I couldn’t.

Business people have an sensitive nose for smelling out things like this. And they fired me. But I had gotten a good smell of them too – and I did not like that smell. I got out.

I can still see myself as a Modern person – or more accurately a Post-modern person. And I can tell the difference – because I have played the game and I know the rules.

I know my insights have wandered into a land where they have become invisible. And there is nothing I can do about that.

2013
05/02
CATEGORY
Business
Philosophy
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